Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius has gone on record as a full convert to artificially generated engine sounds piped into the company's electric vehicles, describing his turnaround to Business Insider Africa with the phrase 'I was like a born-again Christian.' The admission is notable not for its novelty — fake engine noise in EVs has been a regulatory and engineering debate for years — but for how openly a CEO of a premium German marque is now staking brand identity on a sound that has no physical origin in the car.
Mercedes is not alone in this. Competitors including BMW and Porsche have introduced engineered soundscapes into their electric lineups, and the practice has moved from niche audiophile debate to mainstream product feature. The shift matters commercially: luxury EV buyers still associate acoustic feedback with performance, and removing the visceral V8 rumble risks stripping vehicles of a sensory cue that historically justified price premiums running well above $100,000 per unit in the segment Mercedes competes in.
The strategic logic is straightforward. When the engineering differentiators between EV platforms — battery chemistry, range, charging speed — are converging across manufacturers, the experiential layer becomes a defensible moat. Sound design, once the domain of film post-production, is now a product category that automakers are actively investing in. Källenius's public endorsement signals that Mercedes is betting the feature will stick, not as a gimmick, but as a permanent part of the electric drivetrain experience.
For African automotive markets, the implications are worth tracking even if mass EV adoption remains years away on most of the continent. South Africa is the region's most developed passenger-vehicle market, and premium German brands — Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen — have deep manufacturing and sales footprints there. As those brands globally retool around EV platforms, the feature sets and brand narratives being locked in now will arrive in African showrooms eventually. Understanding that 'authenticity' itself is being engineered into these products reframes what premium positioning means.
A parallel and stranger story of manufactured experience broke on Instagram, where a food fight involving Oreo cookies went viral before observers began questioning whether the entire episode was a staged advertisement for an AI company, according to Business Insider Africa. The episode — dubbed 'Oreogate' — illustrates the accelerating difficulty of distinguishing organic social content from engineered virality, particularly as AI tooling makes high-quality synthetic content cheaper to produce and harder to detect.
The mechanics of the suspected stunt follow a well-worn playbook: seed apparently spontaneous content, let platform algorithms amplify it, then reveal the brand connection once reach has been maximised. What makes the Oreogate case notable is the alleged AI company angle — if confirmed, it would represent AI being used not just to generate content but to manufacture the appearance of a grassroots moment, with a legacy consumer brand's identity used as bait.
For African marketers and brand managers, this is a practical warning. Social media marketing budgets across sub-Saharan Africa are growing as smartphone penetration deepens — Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Ghana collectively represent tens of millions of active Instagram users. As global brands and AI companies test increasingly sophisticated influence operations on these platforms, local operators face a more polluted information environment in which consumer trust is harder to earn and easier to destroy.
Taken together, the Mercedes sound story and Oreogate point to the same underlying pressure: as physical and digital products become easier to replicate, companies are competing on the quality of the experiences and emotions they can manufacture. The business risk is that consumers, once they understand how much is engineered, recalibrate their trust entirely — and the brands that disclosed the artifice early, as Källenius did, may end up better positioned than those caught staging it covertly. Transparency about the fake, it turns out, may be the most durable authenticity strategy available.